Campaign situations to avoid to prevent crashes

[Conan's Might]

Hi guys,

Playing as the Seleucids and had to change my action to avoid a repeat crash. Basically besieging a city, with a full stack in, then attacked by a rescuing full stack. So a x3 full stack battles is about to start. I get to the loading screen before a fatal graphical error message appears.

So is this a common limitation of the mod where x3 stack battles will lead to a crash? - I appreciate I could just be unlucky in this instance.

Also are there any other common campaign situations I should avoid to prevent crashes?

Thanks!

[QuintusSertorius]

Don't play long sessions (more than a couple of hours) without saving and quitting. That's the only way to clear memory.

Multi-stack battles generally are problematic for triggering memory leaks.

[Raiuga]

try downgrading your graphic settings for that battle. It sometimes worked for me.

[I_Damian]

Multi-stack battles have been a problem since EB1 (and other large mods for Rome 1 and Medieval 2). They don't even have to be full stacks - I've had it happen with two full stacks + two or three units from another stack. Avoid multi-stack battles as if they were the plague.

I would also avoid siege battles, honestly. Siege battles take a long time in EB2, up to an hour or even more. So if you've been playing the game for an hour, then you fight a siege battle that also lasts an hour, by the time you end that battle you're in memory leak territory and increasing your chances of a crash, losing the progress of that long battle you just fought.

What I usually do is besiege an enemy city until they either run out of supplies and surrender or run out of supplies and sally out to attack me (this battle is much shorter than a siege battle). You can have a second army in the area to deal with any relief forces the AI might be marching to the city (which would result in a battle with more than two armies).

In a previous version of EB2 I noticed that I got way more crashes when all my graphics settings were on maximum, even though my PC is powerful enough to run 100 instances of Medieval 2 on max graphics at the same time without breaking a sweat. Ever since then I play with all my graphics on medium and large unit size instead of maximum. I don't play EB for the graphics anyway, I play it for historical immersion.

Apart from that there isn't much you can do to avoid occasional crashes. You must save and exit the game every hour or two though like Quintus said. I do it every hour to be sure.

[Jurand of Cracow]

Don't play long sessions (more than a couple of hours) without saving and quitting. That's the only way to clear memory..

Every hour of play there's a reminder to the player to take a rest for health purposes.
Maybe you could add a text that it makes the computer feeling better as well?

[Conan's Might]

Thanks for the feedback guys!

[Erken]

Fatal graphic error: do your own research, no need to search further (unless you're playing on a toaster)

[Genghis Skahn]

Make lots of backup saves to lessen the impacts of savegame corruption

[tentaku]

at least you can avoid crashes like this, i had a crash in my campaign that happens on the rebel's turn and no matter how I reload the same crash happen. Had to abandon that campaign